I remember "inventing" a tv watch when I was 5. Clearly that's not an invention. On the other hand coming up with the idea of the solid state transistor in th

I remember "inventing" a tv watch when I was 5. Clearly that's not an invention. On the other hand coming up with the idea of the solid state transistor in the mid 1920s is not as useless an invention as my 5 year old self's invention of the tv watch. On the contrary, it was a brilliant idea. There is no doubt a longer story about why it didn't go anywhere then, and the fact that it didn't go anywhere tends to negate the claim to "invention", but that's semantics. The idea itself was world-changing. I'm sure Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen were aware of this earlier work and would have found it inspiring because if there was any way to achieve solid state transistors... (Imagine how WWII would have gone had one of the major powers had solid state transistors.)